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World Wildlife Fund [link]


The Photo

I took this shot on a beach where I’ve done quite a lot of shooting in the past, and I’ve noticed this concrete structure (it covers a pipe which empties waste into the ocean) quite a few times. Most of the time it is below the ocean, so it is covered in these barnacles and sea weed, which really creates an interesting texture.

I’ve been trying to shoot it for a long while. The concrete structure is usually under water, except at very low tide. I’d been waiting for the tide to be at the right level at sunset, so there was enough water to shoot a long exposure, but not so much that the waves would wash me away. I was also waiting for the sky to have enough drama in it to create a shot with the atmosphere I wanted…so I’ve been waiting for months.

I had to be quick with this shot as the tide was coming in and I didn’t want to have to wade back to the beach, and as I finished shooting I noticed the afterglow of the sunset (to the right of this image) was turning the sky over there a brilliant red. I couldn’t compose a shot from where I was, so I ran around to the headland that you can see on this photo (the same place where I shot [link] and [link] ) but I was too late, the colour had gone.

Technique

When I planned this shot, I intended to do it using a very long exposure of a couple of minutes to remove the texture from the water and the sky using a 9 stop neutral density filter.
However, I also took a few without the ND filter, using shorter times as well, and in the end I preferred these shots as I liked the definition in the sky, and the different textures in the water.

To get the shot, the tripod was set up on a part of the concrete which was slightly wider. There’s not a lot I could do in terms of composition, the shot really needed to be centered or it would look odd.
My main concern was in getting enough sky and foreground texture, so the tripod was quite close to the ground.
I took my base exposure reading from the concrete, then measured the sky to see how much brighter it was. The difference wasn’t that great and I could have used a 2 stop filter to balance the exposure, but instead chose a 3 stop filter instead as I wanted to emphasize the darkness and mood of the clouds.

I used a cable release to trip the shutter, and took around three 8 second exposures.

Post Processing

I always intended this to be a square crop black and white, it fitted with the mood and the composition.
So I cropped the edges off in Aperture, and then took the photo into PS for the conversion.
I’m sure everyone has a different way of doing black and whites, and I’d love to read how other people do theirs. I try a variety of different techniques, but the one I like the most which gives me the most control over contrast is to convert the image using Lab Colour.
Basically, select Lab Colour from Mode in the Image menu, then go to the channels palette and select channels. I then select the Lightness channel, before going back to Mode in the Image menu and selecting Grayscale and discarding the other channels. I then duplicate the background layer, using Multply (not Normal) which gives a nice high contrast black and white image.
You can control the darkness by reducing the opacity of the duplicate later.
Finally, I used a curves adjustment layer to make a very slight S-curve to really hone the contrast, and that’s it.
Resizing and sharpening are the last steps.

Metadata

Taken on Carcavelos beach, Lisbon, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20 | Nikon cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard graduation neutral density filter
8 seconds | f9.5